Cortex AMA Summary Recap with Shin Chan Community

Shinchanieoalerts
9 min readOct 6, 2021

We held a live AMA with Co-founder at Cortex Leo Kish on 6th October 9:00 PM (UTC+8). Here’s the recap for those who missed it.

Introduction

Serene: Welcome Leo, Before we start our AMA today, can you give a brief background of you and your team?

Leo | Cortex: My name is Leo. I’ve always been interested in how systems learn, what learning is from a system’s perspective. That led me into neuroscience and then software design and digital health.

From a network, from a learning perspective in digital health it was always clear that the digital health will only work when user’s have all their health data is a kind of personal cloud of data owned by them.

And that’s what led to Cortex, a way for you to own your data.. but also your relationships and your crypto.. in a way that doesn’t exist yet. Bringing Web3 to data and relationships that you own.

When crypto started becoming better known, our co-founder @hexorx was also working in digital health, but already deep into cryptography and bitcoin, he had a similar idea and started building a system for “an individual centric, cryptographic data store.” We met at a bitcoin meetup and started building out a system to do that.

We discovered that the need for data controlled by individuals was much bigger than healthcare and so we built a more general purpose front-end to help people build a decentralized web, all controlled by them, not a third party like Google or Facebook. That is Cortex.

Serene: Any latest/ update news about Cortex you would like to share with our community?😀

Leo | Cortex: Sure, our platform is ready for launch. We’ve been working on it for a while.

So token sale will be in about a month for a utility token.

Our seed sale is just closed.

Now we are getting ready to announce some key partnerships. Stay tuned at @app_cortex on twiter and our tg community, cortex_app.

We have an exciting roadmap and some high profile investors we’ll be announcing shortly as well.

AMA Twitter Section Begins:

Q1. Can you tell us what do you believe that are the stronger elements that make Cortex a unique way in comparison with others?

Leo | Cortex: Cortex brings together a complete decentralized experience for users in a way that makes it easy. You own your domain. You own your data. You own your relationships. And then you can mix them in a bunch of new ways.

We like to say that Cortex lets you build your digital kingdom.

On the slightly technical side, there’s a few things that enable this.

1. decentralized domains that are NFTs that you can get and own forever through butterfly protocol, one of our partners, butterflyprotocol.io

These are different than other decentralized domains and will be one of the primary uses of our tokens.

With these domains, say ShinChan.crtx. you will own everything underneath, say community.ShinChan.crtx.

And each subdomain is also an NFT that can be sold.

And beyond that, every file you create will have a home in a crypto wallet that has a URL that is a valid crypto address.

So NFT assets can live at a crypto address with a meaningful name. say, ShinChan.crtx/NFTs/cryptopunks/punk3456

that is a valid address that can send and receive tokens, and can also host metadata around the token and a page.

Then, by linking and messaging and private spaces, you can work with who you want to work and message in an environment where you own everything, the content, the assets, the comments that you make on other pages. It’s all yours in your personal architecture.

you could host an NFT gallery that belongs to you, for example (not opensea).

This is just the beginning, there is so much more.

Q2. Currently the project works under the polygon network but I would like to know if you plan to expand the project ecosystem to other smart chains? What other smart chains would be ideal to reach a perfect web3 solution?

Leo | Cortex: The domain name system we are using, Butterfly, once we launch on Polygon, will resolve across Ethereum, Cardano, Polygon and several others. Eventually, we expect butterfly protocol will be available on all chains.

In addition, we’ll be announcing a key partnership in the next month or two that will make it very easy to create and share assets that are *almost chain-independent, as well as very inexpensive to mint.

Our goal is to turn everything we are used to doing now in web2 into assets on web3, including chats like this. :)

That will require very inexpensive minting and transacting, which is why we are starting on Polygon and why we are architected from the core to be blockchain-agnostic.

the core architecture can work without any chain, but is blockchain compatible through the wallet that it is based on.

Q3. According to the roadmap of Cortex, they will launch wallet and hub.Can you please explain bit more about this.what is this wallet .is it web wallet or Mobile wallet.
Also what is the purpose of hub.

Leo | Cortex: So we will launch with a desktop app that is a combination browser and web3 publishing tool.

Essentially you can think of it like a blog or wiki and browser combined. That is the Cortex app. It will allow you to create pages under your domain and navigate through this new web3 environment.

You will be able to link to other pages, for example.

The hub, or cloud version will be a decentralized app that will expand on the social and collaborative features so every page you create can become more like a github or a google docs, where people can collaborate on the content they create. There will also be new ways to earn based on these collaborations and asset building.

We are also architected to expand quickly to mobile, so that you can work across all platforms with the same information, similar to note-taking apps you might be used to, like evernote, notion, etc.

Q4. I understand that all “digital material” becomes a kind of “digital asset” and can also be posted quickly and easily to decentralized DNS using the Butterfly protocol. But how does all this fit into the NFT? What are the benefits of adding this asset to a non-exchangeable token?

Leo | Cortex: You can think of it this way. Everything you create has a certain immutability and a version on the back end. The versioning is blockchain-like in many ways, maybe like a personal blockchain. So in that sense, it has some asset qualities. it has a moment in time.

It has a history and story.

But that’s not in a shared environment and it’s not say, an ERC721 standard that people think of as an NFT.

Now, you could mint it into an NFT and post it on-chain for a fee.

The benefits of our architecture is that it strips away the costs for most activities, while keeping the benefits of immutability until you want to transact or post publicly.

of course, you can turn any data into a token, and that’s the direction we are headed for our users, to make it easy.

and low cost.

Q5. In Cortex, AI models can realistically be run on the blockchain in a decentralized, transparent, and secure manner. Do users have to have some level of knowledge to use the concept of artificial intelligence? Can you tell us about the experience of the Cortex team in AI?

Leo | Cortex: This bring up a benefit of Cortex I really love. I call it being “algorithm-free.”

Right now, in most social apps you are at the mercy of the algorithms that feed you what your friends are doing or saying.

or news, or ads.

On Cortex, since you own the data, and your friends own their data, you can decide what tools you will (someday) be able to use to feed you the most relevant info.

in early versions, you’ll be able to search by topic.

But long term, we hope to grow and ecosystem of user-friendly AI that can bring you the best information based on what you want.

you should be able to hire your algorithms!

Telegram Live AMA Begins:

Q6. Cortex is unusual in that it assists in the creation of a public private world for the same people. How can the system in Cortex be the same system in this case? Is there a method to link these files and crypto addresses in a different way?

Leo | Cortex: We have developed a new kind of linking.

We call them “blinks” for “blockchain links”

Because each page is a URL, and each URL is a valid crypto address, linking pages like you do on web2 also links crypto addresses in web3.

Then there are some other very cool innovations where we use “channels”

These channels allow certain links to be only shared with those you choose, or to be available publicly. Security for each file is built in at the root.

That’s about all I can say, but there are other big innovations that are unique to Cortex.

Q7. It appears that Web3 publishing, cryptographic URLs, and the features you will provide will necessitate a high level of technical expertise before a user can proceed. Is there any way you could have made this easier? Are there any guidelines to follow?

Leo | Cortex: In fact, a primary goal of Cortex is to make it simple for ANYONE to operate in this environment.

That’s why we believe that having URLs, that are human (and machine) readable as crypto addresses will be really groundbreaking.

Sometimes we say we want to be an ENS for everyone. ENS is hard for normies to use. But these crypto domains are one of the biggest opportunities in crypto right now, and why Budweiser bought beer.eth. Cortex will abstract away a lot of the crypt complexity, but allow people to use Web3 like they are used to using web2, without the 0x4…. that scares a lot of people away.

Q8. Almost 1/5 of investors are focused purely on the price of token in short term instead of understanding the real value and health of the project. Could you tell us on motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in long term?

Leo | Cortex: We have built our tokenomics for the long term.

We will burn tokens to limit supply as they are used, and of course the supply is capped. Vesting periods are long. And we have a long roadmap of new uses and utilities that we will continue to add. There are also built-in network effects, the more people that join, the more people who operate in this environment, the more uses we build all drive towards benefitting the community and the HODLers.

Q9. You mention that Others can also digitally sign for an additional verification of their authentic self,but I really do not understand what they mean, it will be that in addition to having a smart identity in barcodes, users can use another identity through of a digital signature?

Leo | Cortex: So this just means that if you had a driver’s license in your Cortex wallet, or some other ID, you could also have the certifying body sign that it is authentic. You can have on-chain verification that an ID is valid, or better yet, that individual elements, like, say, just your date of birth, are valid, without exposing all your other info.

We had this in mind for medical records. Maybe you just wanted to share your medication list, and who prescribed it signed off on it (digitally). That way, you don’t have to expose all your data just to prove one element about yourself that’s right for the situation.

Q10. Cortex & Unstoppable domains both uses Butterfly Protocol,
Could You tell more about this Protocol,
What are its Advantages?

Leo | Cortex: I would check out butterflyprotocol.io.

Q11. The rise of the decentralized networks of Web 3.0 is one of the most powerful meta-innovation in human history. Does this technology have the potential in Cortex to allow people to create and create new pages on Web3, not only to increase innovation but to accelerate the rates of technological evolution and economic growth to such an extent that we fundamentally solve the problem of innovation. ? explain

Leo | Cortex: Innovation is part of life. It is life. :)

I hope that we will do a small part to accelerate it, tho. Where people can actually earn and get credit for what they create, as their creations will all have a history (and a crypto account) that is tied to them. Your creations become yours, forever, and you can also receive payment where those creations live.

Q12. I read Users on Cortex can have a .crtx subdomain, but I don’t really understand it, so can you tell us more? What is a .crtx subdomain? What purpose does it have and what benefits will it provide to users? Why should users have subdomains and how can they get them?

Leo | Cortex: You’ll be able to buy the domains on our website and in the app.

-End-

--

--